Border Attempts

“Please,” I beg the stony-faced visa official at the Ghana Embassy in Madrid, “It’s Christmas. All I want is to sit on a mat with Fatmata Binta and eat Fulani food with my hands.”

Meeting up with a nomadic chef is not easy. And, as boatloads of desperate migrants can tell you, neither is crossing borders. I grew up undocumented in the USA and am currently living in Spain, my sixth country, so I am particularly sensitive to immigration issues. I will also go anywhere to eat.

The consular personage gives me only a grim look and another hoop to jump. For weeks I have been trying to get a visa to Ghana, filling out forms, providing bank statements, getting yellow fever shots and a police background check. All for nothing–in the end, no visa materializes in time to make my dinner reservation in a Fulani village.

Should the Ghana Tourism Authority ever become interested in boosting visitor numbers to the country, they should start by revisiting their visa process.

Stymied by a Dantean level of red tape that only an unholy threesome of Ghanaian and Spanish and Brexit-generated bureaucracies could create, I almost give up on meeting Chef Fatmata Binta, 2022 winner of the prestigious Basque Culinary World Prize for her work showcasing the foodways of Fulani tribal women of West Africa.

Desperate, I briefly consider taking a smuggler boat on its way back to Africa. On second thought, maybe we can talk on Zoom? When Chef Binta is over an hour late for our appointed video chat, it’s because she was delayed getting a visa at the Moroccan embassy. Figures.

Born in Sierra Leone to Fulani parents with ties to the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea, Chef Binta lives in Ghana and is a member of the largest nomadic ethnic group in the world. There are over 25 million Fulani across West and Central Africa. Because of a brutal civil war, an Ebola outbreak, and the pursuit of education, Fatmata Binta has also done her share of migrating, including a stint of teaching English in Madrid and attending culinary school in Nairobi.

For pastoral Fulani, crossing borders is a way of life. For Chef Binta, it became her culinary mission.